Spotify and Digital Music Marketing: Old versus New World

From the artist’s point of view, they can obviously capture a larger revenue share and use someone like Ease Agency or a pure digital agency, and market themselves more online than they would, historically?

Yes. With a higher share of the revenue comes a lot more responsibility on the artist and management side. When we talk about the 90s, you would just hand in your record and you’re done. Nowadays it’s about finding someone who does your artwork; it’s about managing freelancers and finding someone who does your video shoot. It’s a lot of project management to do all these little bits and pieces. It asks a lot more from the management party, compared to 20 years ago, when they would probably just do the licensing agreement and check if the artist was ready to do an interview.

That’s changing a lot and that’s where we think we can be a great resource for managers who don’t have the time and the knowledge. Probably, the band members are a bit older and they don’t really know how to navigate this space. This is where we think we can help. Because the revenue is now coming from so many different ends, it’s very important to have a cohesive strategy and branding for your entire brand. I’ve seen a lot of cases where there was great campaign for a record, but then the tour marketing that was right after it, was very different, looked like shit and didn’t tie back to the brand at all.

In my opinion, the time where the record should be streamed the most is when you are on tour. That’s when people are excited and they want to hear it afterwards; they’ve found a particular new song that they like. For me, the whole year is an ‘always on’ campaign. I say, to a lot of my clients, back then, you marketed your records like an iPhone so you build a lot of suspense, all the new features, the teasers and then it came out to the market and that’s your biggest selling day.

Nowadays, I want them to think it’s more like a utility. People can listen to unique, new music every day. For example, the Coca-Cola brand, they always have the same product, they didn’t change it. However, they still market it every day, because every day could be a Coca-Cola buying day for everyone. I want them to think that every day is an opportunity for people to not buy your record, but to stream your record and you have more market share for that day, which is the ultimate goal, in terms of streaming revenue.

We don’t really like to do an album campaign, three weeks and then let go. We try to make it work the whole year round and bring attention and awareness try and pull people back in, when usually, the former label marketing department would already be on their next artist.

What’s the biggest challenge in that ‘always on’ marketing campaign?

For me, it’s changing the mindset or elevating the mindset of the artist that it is always on. They were used to the model where they did their record, they do their tour and then they do nothing for three years; that’s a great life to have. Now it’s a lot more work because we have to think, why could it be interesting to listen to a record that was released three years ago and what makes it important for January 2020 and why would you listen to it now? It often deals with the zeitgeist movement, even as little as participating in a meme, with those type of things being relevant and tying back to all of your catalogue. I think that’s the most important, and also difficult, thing for us to come up with something new, almost every week.